On paper, I was fine.

Senior, busy, the person other people brought their problems to. If you'd asked anyone I worked with whether I was alright, they'd have said yes without thinking about it. I was the steady one, the one who could keep a room calm while something was going wrong inside it. The men who aren't okay are usually the ones who look the most okay. Looking okay is a skill, and I'd spent years getting good at it.

There was no moment where a man in my position was meant to put his hand up. So I didn't. I kept going past the point where I should have stopped, because stopping wasn't a thing men like me were supposed to need. Then it broke, and not in a way I could tidy away by the next morning. The place I worked had a process for almost everything. It had nothing for this, and nothing for me.

For a long time no one noticed. I was getting worse in plain sight, still turning up, still delivering. So I did the thing men are always told to do. I went and asked for help. I want that on the record, because the easy story is that men won't reach out. I reached out.

The help was wrong. In 2008 a doctor decided what was wrong and treated me for it. He'd missed what was actually happening, and the medication he gave me for the thing I didn't have did the one thing it should never have done to the thing I did. It didn't steady me. It lit me. What followed was a few months of being a version of myself I couldn't govern, making decisions at speed that other people would hold me to for years.

And then, with the damage everywhere, no one was there again. I was left to live it out alone. Money. Work. People. One thing fell and took the next with it. The episode was short. Clearing up after it took the better part of a decade. The same failure, three times: no one watching while it built, the wrong call the one time I reached the system, and no one watching after, while I paid for it.

The thing that took longest wasn't the recovery. It was the name. When it finally got named properly, the relief wasn't what I expected. It wasn't my character, and it wasn't a run of bad luck. It was a condition, and a condition is something you can do something about.

What put me back together wasn't dramatic. But the thing I didn't see coming was a room. Every Monday night I sit in one with other men, and we talk. Most of them had looked as fine on paper as I had. It isn't that men won't talk. It's that almost nothing is built for the way men will. Give a man the right door, low enough to walk through without it feeling like defeat, and he'll say things he's never told anyone.